Binary beat

Xara Xtreme delivers art, graphics in value package

Web site offers demos, tutorials that bring $79 program to life for users

January 29, 2006|By James Coates

Let me tell you just how old I am.

I am so old that I remember buying a 45 r.p.m. record of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" the day it was released.

I am so old I remember booing President Truman when they put on newsreels before the Hopalong Cassidy serial at the Saturday afternoon movie matinee.

I am so old I remember when computers were actually used for computing.

Now our computers are e-mail boxes, Web browsers, music players and news sources.

Hardly anyone uses these powerful computing machines for actual computing. And that's a shame, even if I am a codger for saying so.

This brings me to a review of Xara Xtreme, a $79 computer graphics program at www.xara.com. This software draws on all the powers of a modern PC to give even beginners the ability to enhance our surroundings with home-brewed works of professional looking art.

Located in the suburbs of London, the Xara Group Ltd. offers its software for $79--challenging San Jose, Calif.-based Adobe Systems Inc., which makes the $499 gold standard of graphics software, Adobe Illustrator CS2.

You see the fruits of Adobe Illustrator every time you pick up a newspaper and look at the special section artwork. Illustrator makes possible everything from posters on the side of a bus to borders of hearts on a Valentine's Day card.

Point your browser to the Xara Web site and you will find slickly designed (no surprise there) sales pitches and tutorials that show how this inexpensive software puts the ability to create this kind of artwork closer to a hobbyist's grasp than I ever imagined.

The site actually is a big part of what makes Xara Xtreme such an enticing product. It is filled with short movie tutorials, written instructions, templates, examples, clip art, fonts, backgrounds and other materials that make eye-popping creations fairly easy to cook up on a home computer.

Whether you're a frustrated artist or just a parent out to design kid-friendly invitations for a birthday party, the artwork that comes out of Xara Xtreme can be far better than the clunky templates that come with consumer photo software or those offered by Web photo services.

But the greatest thing about Xara Xtreme is the enjoyment one gets from just playing. It is the adult equivalent of that first tray of watercolors that enraptures children during art time in kindergarten.

Vectors determine quality

The key element with Xara Xtreme is that it mostly works with vector graphics instead of the familiar pixels in the bit-mapped pictures that come out of digital cameras. Vectors are mathematical formulas that describe an image, and they have the same quality whether shrunk to a postage stamp or spread across a billboard.

Xara Xtreme opens with a white block representing the size of the artwork desired. A collection of tools run down the left-hand side of the screen and one adjusts what each tool does using a bar of options on top.

Consider just using the software to draw a picture. Vectors bring startling results even if you drag a brush cursor to draw something crude, like a house, made up of roughly square sides and a roof represented by a skewed triangle. The software breaks the lines you draw into many different segments each delineated by a point. These points can be dragged up and down or from side to side as far as desired to permit one to smooth out the crude sketch until it looks like a precise drawing off a draftsman's table.

Lines can be made as fat or as skinny as desired and of any color. Once drawn, elements can be copied and pasted to create tricks like creating a forest from a single tree.

Put together, this allows things like creating your own fonts and adding tricks like bevels or contours to make them stand out and take on elegant shading.

Picture editor easy to follow

To add bit-mapped photos to a graphic, the software includes a program called the Xara Picture Editor, a remarkably simple tool that lets users quickly fix color and contrast and crop images as well as shrink and enlarge them within the limits of pixels.

Pictures can be stacked collage-style in the artwork. Images can overlay one another or be made nearly transparent to allow elements below to appear. A group command can take a single photo and create a string of ever-smaller copies like a deck of cards being fanned.

Writing about graphics is like trying to describe a circular staircase without using one's hands, so I urge you to take a look at the examples on Xara's Web site for a clear impression of how it will work in your world.

At the very least, you can always wait a few years and then tell your grandkids how you remember all the way back to when there were pictures that didn't even move.